Looks like a bad plane ride these days for EMC on the VMax front.    You can turn your cell phone back on but don’t expect to sip champagne if you’re selling VMax for a living.  We’ve been looking for them in the field and like good seats on a plane, they’re scarce… but even discounted, they don’t sell.

How many VMax  are  out there?  Remember how it was code-named “Tigon”, an infertile hybrid cat?   What I’m hearing is really not that many despite many traditional sales techniques to entice customers. 

Interestingly enough, Mr. Burke from EMC avoided the question when I asked him directly on Michael Hay’s blog, essentially confirming that people are just not convinced.  

These are tough times, and customers are very smart and will thoroughly evaluate the economic and technological merits of new storage infrastructure investments.  Saying you’ve got a new system, that’s not compatible with the previous generations, and benchmarking it against your own previous poor performers is just not cutting it anymore, even with the great marketing spin EMC put on VMax.  

So what have you heard?

Take a look at the research article from the451 Group.

Note:  access is for subscribers, but I think there’s a guest option as well.  According to the research note,  “HDS claims to have bucked enterprise storage trend as it adds new features”.    

Of particular interest to me is the fact that at least 3 recent innovations that leverage our core replication technology to deliver unique operational efficiencies were mentioned: High Availability Manager (a fantastic capability for seamless data migration in open systems), the Hitachi Storage Cluster for Hyper V, and our Solution for VMware’s Site Recovery Manager 2 (SRM2).

If you didn’t catch this earlier, Hitachi really has some unique capabilities around data accessibility and data resilience, and what it all boils down to is not just the technology, but about how customers  enable operational efficiency through technology:

- Our asynchronous replication solution, Hitachi Universal Replication (HUR) makes a uniquely efficient use of the WAN for wide area capacity optimization. HUR leverages disk-based journaling, write order fidelity, and is really a tool that allows customers to better manage RPO and RTO requirements

- HUR can leverage dynamic provisioning, replication “thin” volumes to “thick” volumes and vice versa

- Talking about combinations and permutations, we have supported externally attached (virtualized) volumes for a while. This enables customers to combine all these features in an integrated fashion

- Hitachi supports multiple data center configurations including pass through configurations that optimize the use of storage

- Hitachi also integrates seamlessly in virtualized server environments (Hyper V and VMware, for example)

- Hitachi provides a high data accessibility option with High Availability Manager

The net-net is that we’ve been doing this for a while now – and we’re keeping our focus on delivering the highest levels of operational efficiency to our customers, and replication technology is critical in achieving this objective. Other 3 letter vendors can’t match these capabilities (that’s a fact) to the ultimate detriment of their customers.

Why should you care as a customer or prospect? In essence our rendition of dynamic provisioning (some call it “thin provisioning”) simplifies and adds operational agility to the storage administration process. It also lets customers purchase less storage capacity up front, deferring storage capacity upgrades in line with actual business usage. This results in operating costs savings (electricity and floor space) associated with keeping unused disk capacity spinning.

Hitachi Dynamic Provisioning software also provides performance improvements through proprietary automatic optimized wide-striping of data across all available disks. Unlike our competitors, Hitachi Dynamic Provisioning software runs on industry-leading Hitachi storage systems and is integrated with their advanced capabilities.

From a technology and operational standpoint, Dynamic Provisioning software allows storage to be allocated to an application without actually being physically mapped until it is used. This means the software allows storage allocations to exceed the amount of storage physically installed. It also means that the provisioning of storage to an application and the physical addition of storage are decoupled.

Putting a business hat on, you can net it out as a capability that extends the life of existing assets through higher utilization and that fosters major reduction of operations management cost and increased storage provisioning agility.

And remember that you can do all of this on systems that are already best in class…

I also want to point out in response to Mr. Burke’s blog comment about Flash drives that while EMC moved aggressively to announce support of Flash before other competitors, EMC did so at exorbitant price points. In addition, this was done with an unknown MTBF that could be influenced by the read/write ratio of a given workload.  Finally, little was said about the fact these new Flash devices were not the most cost effective solution for workloads that required both high random read  I/O performance and high throughput sequential transfer capabilities. In French you call this the “Flou Artistique” – a blurred vision maybe?

In a related conversation, one of my colleagues (we’ll call him Mr M.)  was asking me if we remembered Wide Sky and InVista. I suppose no one disputes EMC’s marketing capabilities, but it makes you wonder what this really means in the long run. HDS has now shipped over 12,500 controllers that are capable of storage virtualization, something that the Big Symm V-Max will never do. Hasta La Vista (InVista) is a few hundred at best.

Did I mention that we have many of those 12,500 systems actively virtualizing third party storage like EMC and leveraging dynamic provisioning, replication and migration capabilities? Customers are doing this because they get operational efficiency and flexibility out of their storage infrastructure. You can’t do that with a V-Max.

With all of its roadmap bells and whistles and hybridness, is V-Max Big Symm going to see the same fate as InVista?

Round One:  Barry the Tigon stuck in a head lock

Well, let’s talk about Barry’s comments on the USP V Platform and the Big Symm (aka “Tigon”; aka: V-miss). While Barry tried to “drive an angle,” it didn’t quite work. A few facts to remember:

- No storage virtualization on V-Max: 12000 HDS controllers out there
- New architecture that’s unproven compared to USP
- There are no performance benchmarks numbers on the V-Max. What do you have to hide? We have the highest independent benchmark (SPC-1 and SPC-2) in class
- FAST = Fully Automated Storage Tiering. Which is SLOW for EMC, as we’ve had this since 2005 and it’s still not available on V-Max
- Catch up to HDS on 3 data center pass-through (we spoke about this previously)
- V-Max Can’t integrate file, object and block services on a single storage platform
- V-Max can’t provide a common BC/DR platform for heterogeneous storage
- And it goes on and on….

I guess we’re “dictating the action”….So, what will we hear next that your guitar goes to 11?

In case you haven’t heard, HDS had a great fiscal year. You can slice it any way you want, but we’ve done great and better than many other vendors. EMC, not so much.

One last thing: If Martha had a recipe for success in storage, it would indeed include HAM!!

And for the other Barry (from IBM): Thank you for your post, I’m sure you’ve seen the comment on your blog.

An easy one is that we’re essentially eliminating business impact associated with open systems applications downtime, and this is big news because it means this capability now extends beyond mainframe.  Others can’t do that.

We’re competing with the pharmaceutical industry since we’re taking numerous headaches away.  Specifically, we’re easing the cost and risk associated with data migration.  Just think of the high number of hosts per storage frame you normally have to deal with, and how the ever-shrinking maintenance window is increasing  IT costs to migrate enterprise storage system.  This is more than a platform evolution, it’s a revolution in how our customers will be approaching the complex, risky and costly migration projects.

Another way to look at this, and actually another good operational advantage that can only be found on our platform is the drastic mitigation of application downtime risk.  When you look at the research out there (reputable analysts, not marketing stuff that someone made up) you will see that primary reasons that affect data accessibility relate to environmental factors, human errors (you don’t want me managing your storage), and other external interruption incidents (too many possibilities to list).

The net, net, and yes, the holly grail:  a reduction of  CAPEX and OPEX and a maximum leverage of the storage platform.  That’s how you bake business advantage in the infrastructure, and that’s also how IT can further extend their past storage investments…only one platform can do this, and it was never code-named after a feline lab experiment or a deep sea predator. Go figure…

HDS just announced storage clustering capabilities on its USP-V and USP-VM platforms, and let’s just say that this is just a beginning.  Unlike other vendors that have had to re-invent their architecture,

"Other Vendor"

thus making it highly unproven, we’re building on our existing platform and adding high availability features that will provide customers with fantastic operational benefits for data migration and advanced Business Continuity.

One more thing – you’d believe the sky is falling at certain storage vendors’ HQs.  In contrast, the strategy HDS undertook a while back is paying off and our CEO Jack Domme just communicated how successful HDS has been last Fiscal Year.  Our vision, our platforms, our ability to execute are the best investment protection for our customers, and today’s storage cluster announcement is another proof point of a successful technology and business strategy.

So, a little birdie also told me:

jasonhiner: At @emcworld CEO Joe Tucci on 4 big trends IT: virtual data center, virtual clients, cloud computing, & virtual applications

BasRaayman: #emcworld Tucci: What’s hot in storage area: higher utilization, business continuity, backup to disk, deduplication and compression

Really?  Is that all you’ve got?

tjtar12: EMC World keynote speech on “cloud” computing creating more questions than answers. #emcworld

I guess it must have been nebulous!

More later….too bad it’s raining, otherwise there’d be more time for golfing.

This product is based on an architecture (powered by CommVault – for more info, see Dave West’s blog)  that includes a common technology engine at its core. The engine also happens to be very smart about the data protection processes and their metadata. Unlike other architectures, everything is one place and can be shared to create what I call a data protection continuum. Compare and contrast with other vendors out there: one module for this, one for that, multiple data bases, agents all over the place…You get the idea. The Data Protection Suite manages system and application backup/restore, migration, protection management and compliance management/archiving.

New additions to the Data Protection Suite for version 8.0 include advances in data reduction as well as virtual server, remote office and workstation data protection as follows:

Data De-duplication
Hitachi Data Protection Suite data de-duplication provides customers flexibility to choose when and where to use de-duplication – remote sites, local file and databases, and even to preserve the reduced footprint to tape – reducing overall tape consumption as well

Virtual Server Protection
HDPS provides data protection services for Virtual Machines/servers – VMware or Microsoft Hyper- V. These include file systems and applications found in VM environments.

Remote Office Branch Office (ROBO) Protection
HDPS is designed to trickle replicated data over slow network connections to centralized storage, where recovery points are maintained for remote office recovery.  HDPS replicated data can also be deduped to further reduce the foot print and the amount of data being moved over the network from the remote office.

Workstation Backup
Hitachi Workstation Backup is designed to target the challenge of protecting data at the edge (laptop or desktop) for recovery or discovery featuring the new Workstation Backup Agent (WBA)

More later…..

We also announced two innovative business continuity and disaster recovery solutions - Hitachi Storage Cluster for Microsoft Hyper-V and Hitachi Storage Replication Adapter 2 for VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager - to support this announcement. More on the Hyper-V Solution in a minute.

So - why E2E virtualization? It’s as simple as this: Separately, server virtualization and storage virtualization have clear operational and capital benefits. But when they are combined, the benefits - the efficiencies - have the potential to be that much greater. In fact, it should be a case of their value being greater than the sum of their parts.

While other vendors may be storage virtualization players, Hitachi is the proven market leader by a long shot (despite what other vendors may say). Hitachi has more than 11,000 storage virtualization systems installed - so we speak from experience. We aren’t just storage virtualization providers, we are innovators. Also, we’re server virtualization neutral, which means we’re all about choice. We believe in giving customers the flexibility to choose from a variety of solutions/technologies to meet their specific business, IT and budget needs.

"Other Vendor"

We’re seeing it with customers, in the press and research, one of the benefits of virtualization is in enhancing the ability to provide Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery. BC/DR is important in any market climate, but in today’s tough economic climate, it’s downright essential.

In the case of Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery, E2E virtualization can help organizations optimize performance, minimize planned and unplanned downtime (i.e., improve recovery point and recovery time objectives) and, importantly, extend data protection to additional applications and data types. This is especially true if organizations are equipped with the proper toolset - a Hitachi toolset. Hitachi offers the right mix of hardware and software platforms to help organizations - medium to enterprise in scale - optimize business continuity and disaster recovery.

Hitachi Storage Cluster for Microsoft Hyper-V extends the benefits of Microsoft Quick and Live Migration capabilities functionalities to geographically dispersed sites; in other words, it extends organizations protection capabilities way outside the data center to protect against a wide-scale disaster, and importantly provides industry differentiated automated fail over and data resynchronization. The Solution can also be used to protect sites locally or within the same metropolitan area. In other words, it can be a business continuity and disaster recovery solution, depending on customer, or more specifically application/data, requirements.

For more information about the other cool features and benefits of the new Solution, check out these pages, here and here. Also, check out Hu’s Blog for more on the subject of end-to-end virtualization.